Thinking with a Feminist Political Ecology of Air-and-breathing-bodies

Abstract

<jats:p> Social theory has paid little attention to air, despite its centrality to bodily existence and air pollution being named the world’s biggest public health crisis. Where attention to air is found, the body is largely absent. On the other hand, conceptualizing the body without life-sustaining breath fails to highlight breathing as the ongoing metabolic bodily act in which the materiality of human and more-than-human intermingle and transmute one another. Political ecology studies how unequal power structures and knowledge production reproduce human–environment relations, including a nascent focus on the body and air – but as separate issues. This article argues that a political ecology of air would productively fuse with a political ecology of the body to bring the visceral realm into intersectional analysis of air’s contemporary materialities. A feminist political ecology situates explicitly air-and-breathing-bodies, their intimately posthuman, relational, elemental and corpomaterial intra-action, at the heart of such analysis. </jats:p>

How Identity Enriches and Complicates the Research Process: Reflections from Political Ecology Fieldwork

“…The relationships developed with research participants are key if we are to better understand some topics at the heart of "new" FPE research (Elmhirst 2011), including gender relations, emotional suffering, the symbolic experiences of difference, inequalities forged on the human body, and the intersectionality of various subjectivities (Buechler and Hanson 2015;Truelove 2019;Allen 2020;Faria et al 2020; Gonz alez-Hidalgo and Zografos 2020; Ham 2020). To date, the FPE literature has been relatively silent on these complex methodological issues.…”

Writing with rocks

“…Calás, Ergene, & Smircich, 2018; Davies & Riach, 2019; Valtonen et al., 2020). It provides a situated account of how our air‐and‐breathing bodies (Allen, 2020) come to matter in relation to rocks. Breathing slowly, together, across distance, we response‐ably offer writing with rocks.…”

“…Breathing, through which common interactional rhythms and synchronous behavior is established between humans (Lyon, 1997) – and between humans and nonhumans (Allen, 2020). Breathing is closely linked to affectual states.…”

Everyday political geographies of community‐building: Exploring the practices of three Zimbabwean permaculture communities

“…Over the past decade, FPE has embraced new materialisms and relational ontologies (Allen, 2020; Hayes‐Conroy & Hayes‐Conroy, 2013), with studies conceptualizing “affective socio‐nature entanglements” (Singh, 2017, 751) and hybrid assemblages (Richardson‐Ngwenya, 2012). Relational ontologies call for deeper attention to the materialities and the boundaries of community (and of the “human”), which are understood as emergent, socio‐material, and political constructs (Murdoch, 1997; Whatmore, 1999, 2002).…”